I know we are close as we pass the blue letterbox at the end of the road on the eastern side. When I used to run these roads, I always knew I was about five hundred metres from home here and, if I had the energy, I’d pick up the pace. We come to the opening of our driveway, pulling in between the trees down the familiar gravel track to the house. It’s always the same when we arrive these days. Silence, climbing from the car gingerly as if stepping into a graveyard. We were here the day we lost the baby. The blood. The pain. Knowing. All that trying, all that money, then emptiness. The trees all around, as green as a rainforest and as wet and thick. That’s the thing with this country – even the best photos of the view miss the smell, the air. Even here, only twenty kilometres out of Rotorua in the middle of native bush, far from the beaches, glaciers and southern mountain ranges, the air has such a distinct feel in your mouth, clean and wet. Like a palate cleanser.

Opening the door, the dusty house breathes. Memories flood me. My grandma making banana pancakes, getting to the end of a summer-long 5000-piece jigsaw puzzle to find it was actually only 4999 pieces. Grandpa’s laughter as we searched for that final piece and never found it. There’s a magic room hidden from view where all the lost socks, remotes, jigsaw pieces are tucked away. Somewhere in the house no one can find. For everything else you can check the basement, the shoebox of old keys, remotes and batteries under the workbench.

‘How long has it been?’ Cain says. ‘A couple of months?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘Longer than that.’ I step inside and everything is preserved just how it was. No break-ins, no fruit left out rotting on the kitchen bench or trees fallen through the new tiled roof. I run my eyes up the dividing wall between the kitchen and the lounge, counting back the years marked by all those colourful notches.

Cain returns to the car and backs the trailer up close to the house. I watch him from the kitchen window for a while as he crosses the yard carrying fallen tree limbs in his gloved hands to load up the trailer. He pulls a mossy car tyre attached to two feet of decomposing rope from shin-length grass. He looks up, sees the other end of the rope tied around a limb of the tree at the lake’s edge. He holds it up. ‘Do we still need this?’

I smile, then he heaves it into the trailer.

I step outside now. ‘Want help?’ I call.

‘No,’ he says. ‘I’m basically done out here, just need to mow the lawn, but I might wait for the grass to dry fully.’